I’ve spent ages looking for a music video and I finally found it!

Those of you who know me, might know I’ve been searching for a music video I remember seeing when I was younger. I’ve at least asked friends about whether they might know it from time to time over the years in the hope that someone would recognize it. However, all I had to go one was vague half-remembered details, since I did not remember anything regarding the name of the artist, title of the song or any of the lyrics. This of course made it hard to search for, not to mention difficult to explain to others.

What I did remember was some key scenes from the music video and roughly the time period it was from. The description would go something like this:

The video was more than six minutes long, and due to its length only parts of it was shown on “Topp 20” (TV show which presented the 20 most sold singles in Norway that week).

It charted sometime around 1994-96. Which is a pretty wide range, but about all I could pin down. (Other songs I remember from that time period include U2’s “Hold me, thrill me, kiss me, kill me” and Nick Cave and Kylie Minouge’s “Where the wild roses grow”).

It featured among others: some exploding barrels, a cave and a mask (some sort of treasure hunt?) and a man attempting to save a woman in a raft approaching a waterfall. The man has climbed a nearby tree and tries to catch here when the raft passes beneath an overarching branch.

As I mentioned, I’ve asked various people about this over the years, and while some have said it sounded familiar, no one really knew what it could be. I have pondered various approaches, including going through each and every entry which charted in that time period. The obvious problem is that it would take an enormous amount of time to go through them all. We are talking about a list with twenty entries which was updated weekly, which effectively means 20×52 songs, and while songs staying multiple weeks would probably bring the number down somewhat it is still a large number. Disregarding the time it would take to watch all of them, even though the lists are posted online along with plenty of the music videos these days, there is no guarantee the video I was looking for would be available somewhere.

So I haven’t really searched all that actively lately, though here the other day I ran across review listing top 10 music videos from the ’90s. Since I didn’t want to get my hopes up, I mainly watched it for the fun of it and expecting to see some songs I had completely forgotten about. And then, when talking about one of the songs, the reviewer mentioned “Oh, and by the way, this video had a sequel” and showed some random clips which seemed eerily familiar. So I looked up the artist on Wikipedia and skimmed the list of singles released around that time period, then saw if I could find the music videos for them. And indeed, after roughly 17 years I had randomly stumbled across the music video I was looking for.

The video in question? Meat Loaf’s “I’d lie for you (and that’s the truth)”. In retrospect, maybe not the best song in the world, but I was really happy to finally solve an old puzzle and see it again.